An update on Atyllah

Good news from Novapulse! Atyllah is recovering! Novapulsian physicians and healers have been able to stem the internal bleeding and with much rest, Atyllah is starting to respond to treatment and care. Granny Were keeps me posted at least three times a day by telepathically barging into my thoughts. She says she doesn't want to run the risk of me going "native" - this, I assume, means that she's worried I'll forget all hennish enlightenment - as if I could!

Meanwhile, I've been going through Atyllah's files and documents and uncovered this piece which I don't believe she ever shared with you. So, for what it's worth, I share Atyllah's thoughts on "taxonomy"

Boxes, Little Boxes

Humanity, for some reason best known to itself, appears unduly unhappy when it cannot box things. Everything on this little planet has to be classified, numbered, ordered, categorised and neatly put in place. As though creation is a neat and orderly thing! Pah! Humans call it taxonomy and to my mind, show an unhealthy interest in making everything "just so". I mean, what's the point? What is the bloody point? All the organisms and species out there couldn't give a damn. They just quietly get on with the business of staying connected to the great cosmic energy, going about their day to day activities, feeding, finding shelter, breeding, rumbling, bubbling, gushing... - and they do a very good job of it too. They're not out there trying to make sense of something that doesn't want sense made of it in the first place. They simply are. They "be" - something, it strikes me, that human are incapable of.

It's strange, you know, this human propensity for doing. Always doing, never being. I don't know why on earth they ever called themselves human beings - should have called themselves human doings...

Of course, you may wonder what's brought this particular bent of thought to mind. It's simply this - it's that tree saving business I recently mentioned to you. Not content to let natural systems be and evolve, the particular bunch of human palookas determined to ensure the decimation of a happy little green lung in the Mugger City have decided that only certain species of flora and fauna may be allowed to grow. So-called alien specimens must go. Frankly, I find it all decidedly xenophobic - as if xenophobia wasn't already in sufficient existence on the planet and this continent. I don't suppose humans though ever stopped to consider how said alien specimens might feel about all this - especially given how they've happily adapted to their environment, put down roots, sent up spores and reared litters of young in the leaf mould... Adapted, generally speaking - something that humans like to praise themselves for, despite all contrary indications that they really loathe and detest change and disorder.

But there's just no peace and no end to the nonsense of humanity is there...
And so, along came a botanist and said, "Here historical evidence indicates the presence of Domain Y, Kingdom X, Phylum A, Class C, Species W, Subspecies H, Genus K..."
I mean who, for the Corncob's sake actually gives a damn? Okay, so the botanist and the scientist and the anthropologist and the zoologist and the etomologist and the paleontologist and the climatologist's and all the other gists who clearly have no real life of their own, do. But you know what the worst of it is, the more these people meddle and organise and collate and the more they think they know, the less they really do know. Their vision becomes so myopic that all they can see is the zit on the end of their nose. The bigger picture vanishes into eternal obscurity while the gist obsesses of the particular and grows increasingly blind to the general. Of course this narrow visions means that they completely forget the nature of well, nature. They forget the meaning and purpose of life. The wisdom they were born with withers up and dies within them. And humanity, so prone to bowing down and worshipping at the feet of its eminent gists, becomes still more and more blinkered in it's outlook. Which is why, of course, the likes of you sitting there in front of your monitor assume I must be a figment of someone's fertile imagination because no gist has ever found me or discovered a way of classifying me! Ha! Call me Atyllah the Elusive Hen!

With the whole planet neatly ordered and boxed, life becomes, thinks humanity, albeit it mistakenly, tame. Ha ha. As if life could be tamed. As if Ma Nature has any intention of ever rolling over and having her tummy tickled. Humanity would, frankly, be better off trying to tickle the tummy of a hungry (genus) Panthera (species) tigris (subspecies) tigris or play house in a volcano - provided you have of course done your homework and first classified your chosen volcano by lava chemistry, tectonic setting, size, eruptive character, geographic location, present activity and morphology.

The trouble with insisting on putting everything into little boxes is that you reduce everything to a certain, supposedly manageable, sameness - and where's the fun, the mystery and the joy of creation in that? Huh? Taxonomy simply reduces the miracle of life, death and All into sterilized pigeon holes. It's no small wonder then that so many humans have lost touch with the soul pool, the great beyond, the infinite void - it's no wonder then that they flounder around the universe, kidding themselves of course that they're not floundering - who us, no never - and happily mucking things up as they go. In its increasingly narrow thinking, all humanity has succeeded in doing is losing touch with all the innate, inner wisdom with which it initially incarnated. In short, by trying to make sense of everything all humans have done is to become horribly anally retentive. Yes it's true. And so we have the great mass of humanity sitting there hoovering up the chairs with its collective bum. Strange, really very strange. And not, I might add, a tad unconfortable and unhygienic - I mean, where has that chair been, Lucille!?

Ba-kaaaak!